What do you really know about your social media followers, friends, and network?

Interestingly, most marketers only have a high level understanding of the real persona those connected to them through social media. Relegated to a PR mesurement, anonymity is the norm; influence (Klout) and perception are the KPIs. And, to be honest, I wonder if a high level understanding of the social media persona is really understood – let alone connected to a B2B marketers prime target audience.

If you are like many, the most you get to show for your social media effort is a warm and fuzzy around your brand. To be honest, the B2B CEO doesn’t care about overall brand perception in the market, he or she cares about the targeted set of buyers that connect with your value proposition. If that is 10% of the market, then you better have 8% – 10% market share, 80% footprint with the customer, and a net promotor score of highly likely with over 60% of your customer base. That is the goal in the mind of the B2B CEO, realistic or not. At a minimum, it is what resonates and is understandable in the corner office.

For B2B marketing, brand awareness and perception just isn’t good enough. On top of that, those metrics you track in social media don’t connect to the demand creation activities. Corporate communications and demand creation remain silos within the marketing organization as they always have. ROI of corporate communications remains a perceived high cost factor in the marketing budget with little connection to revenue generation, except anecdotally.

The reality is that the majority of your followers, friends, and network overall are silent. Any social media measurement means nothing when assessing your influence on your marketing buying processes. Structured around influence and reach, the only thing today’s current measurements really tell you are who can you leverage to SHOUT OUT your message? The only ones that care about this are your PR agency as this is what they are paid to do. Your marketing department is responsible for generating revenue directly and indirectly.

It is time we get better at understanding of the Social Media Buyer Persona of our customers, not the Shouters. The reality is that many times in B2B the social media influencers are the vendors and consultants, not the buyers. If we really want to know our buyers we need to understand what they read, what they share, and what they do to step into engagement. It is more than the tag on the link to the blog or marketing campaign landing page. We need to extend beyond our controlled digital environment and link to the digital environment that our customers interact with to understand. We aren’t there yet.

The buying process is currently beyond what we track today. It is time to think about how to connect the anonymous social media and digital environment to our B2B marketing waterfall.